Glaucoma is an optic nerve damage disease caused by pathological intraocular hypertension, and control of intraocular pressure has become a main means for treatment of glaucoma. Although anti-glaucoma drugs and laser techniques provide techniques and possibility for control of intraocular pressure, due to specificity of the disease, a significant part of glaucoma patients have to receive operative treatment in the end. At present, the mainstream surgery for glaucoma is trabeculectomy, complications of the glaucoma filtering surgery can't be avoided, such as postoperative hypotony, shallow anterior chamber, choroidal detachment and cystoid macular edema as well as problems like bleb scarring may lead to operation failure.
Seeking a safe and reliable operation method has always been a trend for ophthalmologists.
Since the non-penetrating glaucoma operation has been introduced to China in 1990s, experts have made a lot of researches. Canaloplasty is a new non-filtering glaucoma surgery appearing in recent years, referring to implanting a suture into Schlemm's canal through a special microcatheter to expand Schlemm's canal and reestablish the natural passway of aqueous humor, thereby reducing intraocular pressure to treat glaucoma. Without formation of conjunctival blebs, avoiding a series of complications such as dry eye, discomfortable ocular surface, change of immunoarchitecture and prone infection caused by formation of conjunctival blebs, drawing more and more attention from ophthalmologists. Clinical application indicates that it has good and safe intraocular pressure reducing effect. However, current researches show that canaloplasty is only applicable to open-angle glaucoma. For angle-closure glaucoma, canaloplasty becomes an operative contraindication and cannot be widely applied in clinic due to synechia and blocking of iris in anterior chamber angle.